The Sorta-Friends of Davey Brooks

The apotheosis of Just The Tip

Every so often I come up with a neologism that I think is pretty good. Sometimes I see them used in the wild, and feel a little pride at the hint of salience, reassured that, though no statues will be erected in my memory*, I have yet been part of the Life of My Times.

“Just The Tip Trumper,” for example. Variously “JustTheTip” or “Just-the-Tip.” This is the earliest reference I can find, though I may have initiated it previously in social media or barroom ravings.

I like it because, among a certain cognoscenti, the meaning is more or less immediately clear: One who has convinced himself that a certain circumscribed and (within his tribe) shameful activity is alright so long as he stipulates a meaningless restriction. (See also NeverTrumper.)

It is not so widely applicable as it used to be, since the softies who used to sigh in a loud voice that they wished the candidate they preferred, voted for, and constantly defended were not such an obvious criminal scumbag have since let it slide all the way in.

But there are a few holdouts. David Brooks is a good example. Look at this shit from September (a clip from this).

Brooks prefaces all his soft-fash beliefs with the caveat that “a significant chunk of my friendship group” — that’s “friends” in Bullshit — is comprised of Trump supporters, and among them he hasn’t “noticed a sense of walking away from Trump” — that is, despite everything they’re still Trump supporters.

Then he tells us “the people I tend to know” — Jesus, how fluffily do you have to couch your relationship with MAGA people? — “would never go to a MAGA rally.” That is, Brooks wouldn’t mind being seen with them; they don’t wear that hat; they have all their teeth; they wouldn’t embarrass him like the guy in the widely circulated video who taunted No Kings marchers, got his RayBans swiped, chased the guy and ate the concrete.

Anyway, these housebroken MAGA peeps have their Just The Tip limits, too: “Most people I know who voted for Trump don’t like him,” Brooks assures us. “They find him troubling in a zillion ways. They disagree with him on certain policies like the tariffs.”

Tariffs are the only one of the zillion ways Brooks mentions. But had he bothered to mention others, you know they also would be ways that hurt them personally. They love that Trump’s wrecking things like education, public health, racial equality, and the environment, but not that he’s wrecking the economy. They have stocks and pensions, after all, and gotta buy groceries, and they don’t understand why, when this belligerent oaf that America granted absolute power madly thrashes his great bulk, he can’t be more careful not to smash the things they care about — why, it’s almost like he doesn’t have their best interests at heart!

“But they basically buy his story,” Brooks says. “They buy his story that the elites have betrayed us. And one of the ways the elites have betrayed us — they would say, and I sort of agree” excuse me OH COME THE FUCK ON YOU PUSSY, OWN UP! “— in the Biden years, immigration just massively exploded.”

See, immigrants used to be good. In the old days Brooks often went into rhapsodies about how the better sort of conservatives, to which group he not-sorta belonged, were super pro-immigration (“The anti-immigration crowd says this country is under assault. But if that’s so, we’re under assault by people who love their children”).

But then the evil radical lib Biden let in too many of these children-loving foreigners. Brooks would never circulate the vicious pet-eating stories and AI dehumanization that the president he and the sorta-friends he sorta-agrees with does. But he understands why his friend-adjacent cohort does. He’s sympathetic toward them in a way he could never be sympathetic with some Central American lady languishing in an ICE pen. I mean, even if she were released, where would they even hang out?

Now another sorta-friend — this one from Montana (Harlan Crow? I bet he has a place there) — tells Brooks, “talking to progressives” (hypothetically, one imagines; maybe yelling at the TV) “you guys had 40 years to police yourselves. And you didn’t do it. And therefore, now it’s our turn.”

One wonders: Police ourselves? You mean, become rightwing? Start to hate immigrants? There are people in the Democratic Party who would love to have gotten to the immigrant-hating equity first, but most of us are pro-immigrant. That’s not a police matter. That’s morality.

Oh, another thing we were supposed to police ourselves on: “The universities. 82% of college students think they have to lie to professors and pretend they’re more progressive than they are in order to get though school.” If you watch Fox News you’ve probably heard of this study conducted at two universities by “Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm… clinical psychology researchers at psychFORM.” If you’re David Brooks, or one of his friendship-group, you believe it, or pretend to.

Back in April, Brooks lamented that Trump was “attacking” universities with his strong-arm tactics — the kind of tactics that his MAGA half-buds, of course, fully endorse — and called on the schools to band together with “law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement” against him.

Maybe that seems hypocritical to you. But try to see it from David Brooks’ perspective. This kind of show of difference — might we call it virtue signaling? — is what protects David Brooks from identification with the goons who cheer when an immigrant family is torn apart or when Tubby wrecks universities just because he feels disrespected by people who can read and write. Because Brooks only sorta agrees with them — that is, up to the point at which he has to take responsibility for his beliefs, at which point he bails.

And that’s really the secret of Brooks’ success. As loathsome as the causes and people he endorses may be, you’re never gonna be able to pin them on him. He knows well enough not to go MAGA balls deep; like the last few inches of his shaft, he’s in the clear.

* This remains the all-time great joke on that subject.